


you belong with me (have you ever thought just maybe)

by clean



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Canon, M/M, Pining, Winter Break, bg choni/beronica but not enough to warrant a tag, did you all know archie is canonically a sagittarius? well now you do, not explicitly said but jughead doesn’t wear a beanie because he’s not repressed anymore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:20:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24595927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clean/pseuds/clean
Summary: “Didn’t you ever wonder? If it’d happen eventually, I mean.”
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Jughead Jones, Jughead Jones & Toni Topaz
Comments: 7
Kudos: 91





	you belong with me (have you ever thought just maybe)

**Author's Note:**

> i have 2 longer riverdale WIPs i could be working on but i have no self-control so *writes winter break fic in the middle of june* 
> 
> by "alternate canon" i mean that i take whatever i want from the actual show so past s1/2 everyone had a mostly-normal high school experience? ie archie never went to juvie and no one joined a cult. also everyone is less straight
> 
> anyway. new traditions and nostalgia and how every day out of high school feels like 75 years

Jughead thought he’d be happy to get out of Riverdale, but it seems that now he’s out of it he misses it more than ever.

Realistically, Rockland County is only an hour and a bit away from New Haven by car, but it feels like every time he goes back to school he loses a little bit of Riverdale on the way, unintentionally. Kind of like bits of a pastry flaking off?

Well, something like that. Jughead could explain the metaphor further, but first-semester finals were actually hard and he doesn’t have the energy to talk about another literary device ever again. The only reason he’s driving is because Toni simply never got her driver’s license at all.

“Why would I spend time and money learning how to drive if I plan on living in a big city with a reliable public transportation system anyway?” she’s said many, many times.

“Because of times like these where I’m forced to drive you back to Riverdale,” he’s explained.

“Well, that’s what I have you and Cheryl for,” Toni always replies, and he can’t really fight with that one.

Finals are over on the 16th, and they leave straight after their last one (Jughead’s is a history and culture class whose final research paper he just had to submit in person, and Toni’s is Math 222, which covers linear algebra or something? Jughead has never been more glad to not be into math or science. Leave the humanities/STEM intersection to Toni, he thinks.) The car ride only takes an hour and a bit, and Toni gets the aux cord because Jughead has terrible taste in music and is confident enough to admit to it. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, this means he’s become all too familiar with Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, which Toni can and will play on repeat if allowed.

 _I had a feeling that I belonged / I had a feeling I could be someone,_ Tracy sings, and Toni sings along. They’re on the Tappan Zee Bridge, twenty minutes or so out of Riverdale. It’s still technically late afternoon, almost but not quite the evening.

The feeling of going home for break is overwhelming, because with it comes the feeling that things are changing from how they used to be. The way Toni occasionally stops singing to text Cheryl their updated ETA is heart-achingly domestic and familiar—he and Toni had grown apart for a bit junior year, and as much as Jughead hates to admit to liking _anything_ about Cheryl, it’s nice to know small things about her by association, like the fact that she’s one of those people who constantly texts for distance updates. Going to the same college as your small-town high school classmate can really bring people back together.

“Can I play _one song,_ ” he pleads with Toni, and she sighs dramatically but agrees because they’re almost back home and it really can only be the one song.

“No bad pop music or I’m going to kill you,” she says, so he chooses Potential Breakup Song, one of the few songs they can agree is really undeniably a banger. Toni sings Aly’s parts and Jughead does AJ’s, because this is another of their practiced rituals. It’s fun. Jughead, personally, needs a little fun, after whatever the hell he handed to his professor earlier in the afternoon.

They reach Riverdale just before sunset. Jughead drops Toni off first, and Cheryl’s waiting in the doorway already with her phone in hand, clutching it to her chest.

“TT,” she exclaims, and runs up to kiss Toni through the passenger-side with the window rolled down, which isn’t Jughead’s worst third-wheel moment but it’s up there. Toni grabs her bag from the backseat and turns back.

“We’ll probably see each other before then, but we’re still on for Christmas dinner, right?” she asks.

“Yeah, of course,” Jughead agrees, and she gives him a thumbs up before following Cheryl inside. When the door closes, he sighs and leans back against the headrest. He’s not _jealous_ jealous—obviously not, it’s not like he even likes girls—but he does kind of want the whole high school sweethearts thing right about now. Maybe if he’d been out before graduation he wouldn’t be so painfully single now.

When he pulls up in front of their house, his dad’s with Alice on the sidewalk, waiting for him. FP hugs him and Alice joins in on it, which he’s still getting used to but it’s not the weirdest thing ever.

“Dad, Alice,” he greets them. Before he can say anything else, there’s a “hey!” behind him that can really only be one person. “Uh, give me a sec,” he says, and turns around.

“Jug,” Archie says, and crushes him in a hug.

“You may not be a student athlete anymore, but you know you’re still really strong, right?” Jughead asks, on the verge of suffocating. Archie apologizes and relaxes his grip, but doesn’t let go.

“I missed you,” he tells him.

“I saw you at Thanksgiving,” Jughead says into his shoulder. He’s momentarily distracted by how nice non-familial human contact is. Then, “I missed you too.”

When Archie finally releases him, Jughead sees Mary and her girlfriend ten feet behind him on the sidewalk. “Hi, Mary, Brooke,” he says. He feels oddly scrutinized by too many adults.

“Hey, Jughead. We were just about to light the candles, if you want to join us,” Mary offers. Jughead turns back to check with Alice and FP, who exchange a quick look before nodding in approval.

“As long as you’re back for dinner,” Alice says, and he gives her a thumbs up.

  
  
  


It’s the seventh night, so they light the shamash and then with it, the other seven candles. Archie does the thing they’ve always done since they were kids, where he slowly says the prayer in Hebrew and gets Jughead to repeat after him. They may both be 19 now but Mary watches fondly, clearly imagining like they’re still 8 years old.

“Is it just me or were you better at that than normal?” Archie asks, after Mary and Brooke leave them alone in the living room so that they can finish whatever they’re working on in the kitchen.

“One of my suitemates is Jewish,” Jughead explains, watching the tiny flames flicker and dance around. “I’ve been hearing the Hanukkah candle-lighting prayer every night for the past week.” 

“You have Jewish friends besides me?” Archie says, and elbows him.

“It’s _Yale,_ ” Jughead says. They slip into a moment of silence. He breaks it first: “Sorry for not coming down for your birthday,” he apologizes, but Archie hand-waves it away.

“You called in the middle of dead week, which was more than enough. And anyway, you’re here now, right?”

“Yeah,” Jughead agrees. “Also, that reminds me. I have your birthday present in my car. Let me go get it,” he says.

His wrapping job is _terrible,_ terrible enough that even Archie “doesn’t know how to fold paper” Andrews makes fun of him. “Literally what is this,” he says, pointing at a piece of tape that’s holding nothing together.

“Artistic license, obviously,” Jughead says. “Open it.”

Archie unwraps it in a fashion that can only be described as indelicate. Maybe _messy_ does the trick, too. When he takes it out he looks at Jughead and then back at a vinyl copy of Talon of the Hawk.

“You told me about this album. Back when—”

“A couple weeks before our road trip. I told you I was going to make you listen to it but I never got the chance,” he says, and feels bad for bringing that whole thing up again, but Archie doesn’t seem to notice. “I got it off eBay or something. I’ve had it since, like, junior year, I just kept forgetting to give you it.”

“You remember that?” Archie asks instead, turning it over in his hands.

“Of course I remember that,” Jughead says, but when he makes eye contact with Archie it feels like he’s answered a different question altogether.

“So,” Archie says, setting it gently down, “how’s Yale?” And Jughead starts telling him a story, just like old times.

  
  
  


Betty gets back a day later on the 17th, and Charles picks her up from LaGuardia. The two of them spend a good 20 minutes of family dinner complaining about the whole experience before Alice tells them to shut up so they can move on, and anyway, did you _want_ to pay more to fly into JFK instead? Yeah, exactly, so stop.

“California is _hot,_ ” Betty says. “Like, it has no business being 80 degrees in the middle of December? But I love USC. Well, maybe not the neighborhood, though,” she adds. “It’s so sketchy around there.” Jughead shakes his head.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” he says. “People always say New Haven is dangerous and then they barely leave campus at all.”

“Do you?” Alice asks. “Leave campus, that is.”

“Not really,” Jughead says. “I don’t really have the time.”

“I’m sure you have time for _some_ fun,” FP says. “Any girls catch your eye?”

Jughead isn’t closeted, exactly, it’s just not a conversation he ever wanted to have with FP, and apparently no one else has taken it upon themself to inform him. Betty, Alice, and Charles are suddenly interested in looking elsewhere, and JB’s expression says enough.

To be honest, no one’s really caught his eye. There have been a couple dates, but not anything serious enough to warrant any discussion. And there was the night of The Game, when he and Toni had gone up to Cambridge. Cheryl had driven all the way over from Smith to go out with Toni for the night, because Toni couldn’t care less about football and Harvard and Yale’s whole rivalry (she’d gotten into both, anyway). As such, Jughead had been free to make terrible decisions, including almost hooking up with some Harvard ancient history major at a random campus party before he found out the guy was one of those gay conservative types. Definitely a low point of first semester, trumped only by one of his midterms (an astronomy class, taken as a gen ed requirement—particularly disastrous).

Jughead strategically avoids mentioning any of that. “I’ve gone out a couple times, I guess,” he says instead, and shrugs. “Again, just more focused on my studies, you know.”

“That’s my boy,” FP says, clapping him on the back. Betty raises her eyebrows at him but doesn’t say anything, which he’s grateful for. Alice changes the subject to the Daily Trojan, and Betty answers readily, but her eyes linger on him for a moment.

After dinner, Betty and Jughead lie down in the backyard together. It’s a ritual they developed back when they were dating, that they would sprawl out on the lawn holding hands and point out stars to each other and attempt to name constellations. They’ve kept it up since, but obviously with a lot less hand-holding.

It starts off silent. Betty turns to him in the grass and exhales. There’s a moment where she collects her thoughts, and Jughead waits for her to speak.

“You know,” she starts, “when I was in like, seventh grade or whatever, and I had nothing better to do other than play phone games after finishing my homework, I made us—not, like, the two of us, like, our friends too—in this fictional high-school game, and I made Archie date my character.”

“You’ve only been in California for four months and you’re already using ‘like’ fifty times a sentence,” Jughead says. “Also, is that supposed to surprise me?”

“No, wait. So I got us to the max romance level thing and then I realized that we just didn’t look right together, so I broke us up.”

“Oh, like in real life,” Jughead says, just to be mean. She ignores him.

“Yeah. And then I got his character together with yours.”

“Oh.” Then, “Are you only bringing this up now because I’m gay? That’s kind of weird, Betts.”

“ _No._ And not really. Like, didn’t you ever wonder? If it’d happen eventually, I mean.”

There are so many answers Jughead could give. A small part of him wants to say _why? Is that what you deluded yourself into thinking about you and Archie?_ , but he’s not in the mood to be bitter, and not to Betty specifically. He could also just give a simple answer: _No._ He could give an honest one: _When we were in sixth grade Archie kissed me during Seven Minutes in Heaven at Cheryl and Jason’s birthday party, so if he really ever felt that way about me he’s already had his chance to say something, years ago._ He could give another honest one: _Yeah. I think about it all the time._

“Maybe,” he says instead. “Not really.”

“Oh,” she says, and finally turns away, the spotlight of her gaze pointing elsewhere. “Okay.”

  
  
  


The first chunk of Jughead’s break is spent sitting around the house and getting ahead on reading for class, broken up by a couple trips with Toni to the Bijou to make fun of Tarantino movies (“I’m _so_ glad that obsession died with heterosexual you”). Even though they all see each other around town in the days leading up to it—Betty because she’s his soon-to-be stepsister and they live in the same house, Veronica in passing as she steals Betty from the nest on weeknights, and Archie because he’s both their neighbor and as much of a constant in Jughead’s life as he’s been for forever—their old friend group doesn’t properly get together until their scheduled Christmas eve dinner at Pop’s.

Jughead walks there, just taking some time to clear his head and because it’s the first day of the week that it hasn’t snowed. It’s a little cold outside but still nice, and getting to see which Riverdale residents went all-out with their house decorations is always fun. Off of Pine, past Riverdale High but before Pop’s, there’s this house on the corner that’s consistently put up this scary looking blow-up snowman for a decade. It’s up this year; some things never change.

Betty and Veronica have been doing long-distance, and they’ve obviously spent too much time together in the past week already from the way that they don’t even notice when Jughead enters Pop’s and sits down across from them. Archie’s running slightly late but that’s nothing unusual, and anyway, it’s not like he’s really missing out on anything besides Jughead third-wheeling B&V’s romantic staring contest.

“If you guys don’t start an actual conversation with me soon, I swear I’ll say something homophobic,” Jughead says, which makes Betty laugh and Veronica roll her eyes.

“Nice to see you haven’t changed at all,” Veronica says, sighing theatrically, but it’s just Veronica and not Veronica Lodge, unspoken but implied daughter of Hiram Lodge, so he doesn’t really mind if she pokes fun at him.

Archie’s hair is wet when he arrives, late enough that they can all tell that he was definitely still in the shower when Jughead got there. “Sorry, guys,” he says, sliding into their booth, “I didn’t miss anything, did I?”

“Same as always?” Pop calls out as Archie sits down. They all reply in variations of “yes” and “thanks, Pop”, which he waves away.

“I missed having you kids around,” he tells them. “I’m going to go out of business without all of you here every night.”

“I missed you guys too,” Betty says when Pop heads into the back room. “Ugh, not to derail, but I miss Kevin. But he and Josie are having fun, and he sent me a Times Square selfie.” She taps something on her phone and shows them the picture.

“Ah, tourists,” Veronica says gravely.

“At the same time, though,” Betty continues, “I kind of liked not being around here. No offense or anything, but it’s nice to get a break.”

“Yeah, this town has so many bad memories associated with it,” Veronica says, and no one wants to say it but across the train tracks and another half-mile down the street there’s a prison with her last name on it, and the man who built it is in there for life.

“That reminds me—didn’t you go see your dad, Vee? How’s he doing?” Betty asks, voicing their shared silent concern. Veronica takes a long sip of her milkshake with a satisfied smile on her face.

“Thankfully still rotting in prison. Don’t even get me started on it, I have so much to say. He’s my therapist’s favorite subject,” she says, then hesitates.

“It’s fine, Ronnie. I’m pretty sure we all have therapists by now,” Archie says. “I see one in Greendale.”

“First thing I did when I got to SoCal,” Betty agrees, and Jughead nods.

“Really a testament to this town how long we all went without getting any mental health support,” he adds.

“Cheers, I’ll drink to that bro,” Veronica says, and Betty starts a conversation with her about the Eric Andre Show. As Veronica attempts to explain to her that she’s just referencing the meme and she hasn’t ever actually watched it, Jughead turns to look at Archie. He’s leaning his head on his hand and he has this expression on his face that Jughead would affectionately describe as stupid. He’s staring so openly in a way that says he doesn’t care if he’s staring, something Jughead himself would never do.

“What?” he asks, trying to stay neutral even though he can almost feel himself smiling back out of reflex. Archie tends to have that effect on people. Archie tends to have that effect on _him,_ especially.

“Nothing,” Archie says, and kicks him under the table. Jughead kicks him back, and in response Archie hooks his ankle around Jughead’s.

“Whatever,” he says, but makes no effort to get out of it.

  
  
  


Betty’s heading over to the Pembrooke with Veronica after dinner, so Jughead walks home with just Archie. Elm is really only a twenty minute walk or so from Pop’s if you don’t hang back for too long, so even at night it’s not bad. He makes sure to point out the snowman.

“That thing is _so_ ugly,” Archie says. “You’d think someone would’ve filed a complaint by now.”

“Hey,” Jughead says, elbowing him, “Not to change the subject from the ungodly scenery, but what about you? I mean, at dinner we talked about Yale and NYU and USC, but what have you been up to? Only if you want to talk about it, obviously.”

Archie’s taking classes full-time at Riverdale Community College and two music theory classes at Carson, the nearby liberal arts college, as he explains. He looks genuinely happy as he tells Jughead about picking up his guitar and writing songs again, the happiest Jughead’s seen him in a long time.

“That’s great, Arch,” Jughead tells him, and sincerely means it. He remembers Archie’s test anxiety and how many practice tests he took before the SAT, eventually deciding not to take it at all. And that was fine, because test anxiety is the least of his worries. Jughead has been through a lot, but his trauma is immensely different from what Archie still carries with him after sophomore year, and Veronica’s dad, and everything about… _her._ If he was Archie, he thinks, he wouldn’t have kept going at all.

But Archie’s in front of him and he seems to be coping, and that’s honestly huge enough already. Jughead might not ever be able to fully understand any of it, but it’s really as simple as if Archie’s happy, then he’s happy for him.

Archie smiles. “Thanks.” He hesitates for a second, before: “This is kind of dumb, but I just wanted to say that, you know, you’re one of the couple people in my life who never made me feel less than them, ever.”

Jughead stops walking. “Archie, that’s not dumb,” he tells him. He reaches for Archie’s hand and squeezes it tightly when he finds it. “And I hope you know I’d never want to make you feel like that.”

“I know,” Archie says. “And you never did.” They’re on the sidewalk right in front of Jughead’s driveway, almost back at Archie’s house. His porch is twenty seconds away, but he doesn’t seem to want to move in that direction at all. He blinks. “I _really_ missed you,” he says.

“Arch,” Jughead breathes, and kisses him.

There’s that saying that distance makes the heart grow fonder, but Jughead prefers to think that it’s closeness, that it’s the feeling of standing next to someone and knowing you don’t want to stand next to anyone else, wanting to clutch something before it’s dragged away from you. Because before high school, before Valerie and Veronica and Josie, and even before Betty (though she likes to think of herself as the first), before all of them there had been Jughead.

It was Jughead who had to listen to Archie talk about which girls had the prettiest crayon drawings, and who used to read him stories out loud to help familiarize him with the sounds of each word. Jughead liked Archie before he “got hot” or whatever it was the summer after freshman year. Even when they fought, he never stopped being his first priority and the first pick in his mind. Betty might’ve been Archie’s first kiss at age eight but Jughead thinks he was Archie’s first _real_ one, back when they were twelve and quite literally inside of Cheryl’s coat closet.

 _You know that humans have free will, and technically they can’t_ make _us kiss because the rules of Seven Minutes in Heaven aren’t actually real, they’re just societal constructs,_ Jughead had told him, staring down at his hands, and Archie had looked at him for a good moment and comprehended none of it and then said _but we could try it if you want to._

Even if they’ve since pretended that it never happened, and an unspoken agreement exists between them to never bring up that handful of minutes again, Jughead’s thought about it way too many times for it to not have meant something to him. Archie is soft and warm now, just like he remembers, and also substantially better than he remembers. Maybe he’s spent too much time fixating on the faded memory of Archie at twelve, because the vague recollection can’t even begin to compare with Archie at nineteen, who holds Jughead unlike any guy he’s ever been with (a short list that he’s really only had the past 3 months to start putting together, but Yale _is_ the gay Ivy for a reason). Kissing Archie feels like a natural extension of how much he loved him—how much he still does.

Archie breaks away first. Jughead doesn’t really want to stop, but Archie just leans their foreheads together and laughs.

“You,” he says, delighted.

“Yeah,” Jughead agrees, feeling the curve of Archie’s thumb on his cheek and the weight of Archie’s hand on his lower back. It’s impossible to focus on anything other than that feeling. “Yes.”

“Remember sixth grade?” Archie asks. “In—”

“Cheryl’s closet,” Jughead finishes. “Yeah.”

“I knew back then,” Archie says, “but I didn’t realize until later.”

“Sap,” Jughead teases. “Couple months of not seeing me every day and suddenly you’ve been in love with me for seven years?” 

Archie shakes his head no. “Longer,” he says, and kisses him again. Jughead pushes closer and feels the way Archie’s hand tightens on his jaw in response. It’s like gravity, or something similar, something astronomically big and magnetic and collapsing in on itself. Okay, maybe it’s not like gravity (no wonder his astronomy midterm had gone downhill so quickly), but it is good. He’ll leave the metaphors for now. Mostly, Jughead really wishes that he’d figured it out earlier, that this is how he’d spent the last few years.

“ _Hey!_ ” Archie jumps back immediately at the shrill sound of Alice’s voice.

“Oh, my god,” Jughead mumbles, deeply wishing to project himself onto the astral plane. Alice slams the front door shut and barrels down the walkway.

“I will _not_ have any teenage hijinks occurring in the vicinity that is visible from my kitchen window while I’m washing the dishes,” Alice snaps all at once, then pauses. “Forsythe? _Archie?_ ”

“Hi, Ms. Smith,” Archie says, looking at the very least decently embarrassed. “Always great to see—”

“And I thought I had to worry about my _daughter!_ What is _this?!_ ” she exclaims, dismayed. “You can’t at the very least take them to dinner first, Archie?”

“Ms. Smith, with all due respect, I’ve been taking Jughead to dinner since we were four years old. I really think we’re past that,” Archie explains. Jughead stifles a laugh. Alice holds up a hand.

“No need for the snark, Archie. Forsythe, it’s getting cold out, and it’s late. If you have to be with Archie, you can be with him inside at least,” she says. With that, Alice spins on her heel and heads back in, leaving Jughead and Archie a foot apart on the sidewalk.

“She called me _Forsythe,_ ” Jughead says. “Of all the things for her to be serious about, this?” It’s silent for a second. “…So,” he says.

“Well,” Archie continues, trailing off, oddly bashful for the guy who seemed completely ready to introduce his tongue into the equation two minutes ago. Jughead rolls his eyes.

“Come on,” he tells Archie, tugging at his hand, “I’ll show you my room.”

“Your room?” Archie asks, confused. It takes him a moment. “Oh. _Oh._ Really?” He’s way too excited at the prospect. It’s disastrously endearing.

“If you don’t wipe that smile off your face I can and will take that offer back,” he says, but Archie’s already dragging him up the steps and the front path.

  
  
  


The Andrews are over the next morning for joint Christmas, yet another tradition that’s been going since they were kids, though it used to be just Jughead because FP always skipped it and they have some other obviously new additions. But it’s still part of the tradition, Jughead decides, just switched up a little bit. He likes routine, but not so much that he isn’t open to adaptation.

It’s only been fourteen hours or so, and as such Archie hasn’t mentioned the words _boyfriend_ or _relationship_ yet, so Jughead doesn’t say anything to Betty, even though she’s very clearly curious about why he’s slightly more jittery than usual. “Eggnog,” he tells her. She just gives him a look.

“I’m a journalist, remember?” she says. “Whatever. I’m going to help Mom with the pancakes.”

He successfully makes it through Christmas brunch without any more questioning from family members, though Archie does pull him aside to inform him that JB attempted to deliver a shovel-talk and ended up just telling him about how she’d thought they were dating already but she can tell the difference now for sure. Jughead ends up calling Toni around 11 just to make sure that it’s okay for him to bring Archie to dinner as a plus-one.

“I don’t mind, and considering Cheryl still likes him way more than she likes you, I’m sure she’ll be okay with it,” she answers. “Also, _when_ exactly did this development occur? I’d like details. Tonight.”

“No details in front of Nana Rose,” Jughead tells her, but Toni just laughs.

“Nana Rose is the biggest gossipmonger of all time,” she says.

“All the more reason not to tell her,” he replies, but Toni hangs up before he can get another word in.

Dinner at the Blossoms’ looks to be a deeply uncomfortable affair. Toni forwards him a Google Doc with Cheryl’s dress-code and while Archie has at least dipped his toe into the world of Riverdale’s old-money families, Jughead hasn’t dressed up for anything in the last few years besides funerals, college interviews, and one or two school dances; the highlighted phrase _blazers ARE required_ at the top of the page is already daunting.

Once they get there, it’s really not that bad—dinner itself is good (thankfully no one let Toni in the kitchen), Toni and Jughead find that they do actually have PG stories about first semester (only a few, but they do have them), Cheryl has apparently taken up gardening at Smith and has plenty of plant-related tips and commentary (an interesting topic, as Jughead will begrudgingly admit), and Archie just gets along well with everyone, as usual.

“Oh, Jason, you told me about this one,” Nana Rose says at one point halfway through, pointing at Jughead, and no one else thinks much of it but it makes him pause.

“This is Archie, not Jason, Nana,” Cheryl explains. Jughead turns his fork over between his thumb and his index finger, and Archie squeezes his other hand under the table, and then it doesn’t feel like much of anything anymore.

“That wasn’t what I expected our first date to look like,” Archie says when it’s all over, closing the driver’s-side door and turning his key in the ignition.

“You imagined what our first date would look like?” Jughead asks. Archie studies him for a long moment.

“You do remember what I said last night, right?” he says. “Years.”

Jughead reaches for Archie’s hand and intertwines their fingers over the center armrest.

“Years,” he agrees. “Let’s go home.”

  
  
  


Jughead, much like every other writer out there, is at least a little bit obsessed with the past, and this is no exception: he’s fascinated by the differences between then and now, the parallels between years upon years of childhood sleepovers and sharing secrets past midnight and the way Archie’s hands slide painstakingly slow down his sides when he kisses him.

When they were kids, they used to do this thing at night where they would lie down across from each other and Jughead would tell Archie the plot of Zelda games, acting as if he was just a really imaginative and spontaneous bedtime-story inventor. To this day he still hasn’t admitted to it. He thinks maybe they were lying in this exact same position. Maybe a little further apart, but not by much.

“Do you think if we’d been doing this a year ago it would’ve changed anything?” he asks. It’s snowing outside, he notices absently. Archie laughs.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “You’re too alternative for anything like high-school PDA or, like, prom king.”

“Is that an insult?” Jughead says, accusatory. Archie doesn’t bother dignifying him with an answer, just flops over onto his side and beckons for Jughead to join him. He complies, folding into Archie like he’s not at least half an inch taller than him, a piece of trivia he’ll lord over him (literally) forever. It’s quiet until he feels Archie straighten and ask:

“Okay, this is so random, but if Judaism is passed through the mother, and our kids have two dads, then is it not possible for them to be Jewish?”

“ _That’s_ what you’re thinking about in the middle of our moment?” Jughead questions, incredulous. “We’re nineteen and we’ve been together for a week and a half, Archie. I think we can cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“You’re looking at the same guy who once proposed to a girl for helping him learn to read,” Archie reminds him. “And I’m just joking. Mostly.”

“I hope so,” Jughead says, and as he feels Archie exhale against his neck, he thinks about Betty’s matchmaking with her phone-game characters and about Zelda and about how Archie would tell him he was _so good at making up stories_.

They were in the exact same position back then, he thinks. They must’ve been.

  
  
  


Jughead and Toni head back on Friday so that they have the weekend to move back in and prepare for the start of spring semester on the 11th. Jughead says his farewells before he heads over to Cheryl’s, promises Charles yes, of course, he’ll remember to talk to his friend who’s a professor at Yale Law about that internship opportunity, tells JB he loves her and that he’s free most Wednesday nights to play Mario Kart online with her.

Archie kisses him goodbye; not in a way that’s scandalous or anything, because both of their families are right there, but Jughead still hears FP’s confused “Alice?” and knows that he has a long phone call in his future.

“Call when you get there?” Archie asks, and Jughead smiles.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

He doesn’t bother to plug his phone in on his way to the Blossom residence. When he gets there, even Cheryl waves to him, so she’s obviously in a better mood than normal. Toni and Cheryl share one last passionate (like, definitely PG-13, makes-Jughead-look-away-in-awkwardness) kiss before Toni jumps in the passenger side and closes the door. As soon as they pull out of Thistlehouse’s paved stone front plaza of a driveway, Jughead hands her the aux cord without any resistance.

“Not going to put up a fight this time, Jones?” she asks. He shakes his head.

“Not this time,” he says, so it’s back to Tracy Chapman for the time being. _Maybe we can make a deal / maybe together we can get somewhere,_ she’s singing, and it starts to snow again halfway through the drive and Toni’s belting and the notes aren’t all correct but it doesn’t really matter, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> if my NY/new england geographical knowledge is off, it's because i'm from the bay area and my only real source is google maps
> 
> title from you belong with me - taylor swift, obviously
> 
> i'm on [tumblr!](https://englishmajorjughead.tumblr.com/) :~)


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